Ambient, Drone, and Electroacoustic Music

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Akashic Crow’s Nest : Mood Music for Void Gazers

Akashic Crow’s Nest is a sound art project of C.P. McDill which gives focus to the potentials of generative processes.

For the majority of albums released, ACN has utilized images as the source material for its distinct sound. First, very long pictures are created using Photoshop. Sometimes they are hand-drawn, and sometimes they are cut from photographs and subjected to effects and other manipulation. They are saved as very long and narrow bitmaps, and then loaded into a program that reads the hues and values of the image, one row at a time, from left to right, treating the picture as a sort of “piano roll.” Sounds are generated from the pixel information, and rendered to a .wav form, which is then cleaned up, effected, EQ’d and otherwise polished to the form you hear on the albums.

More recently, other generative processes have been explored. See the description on an album’s release page to learn about which particular process has been used.

BOF-041 Akashic Crow’s Nest – Supernaculum
Supernaculum is a strange and varied trip through several dimensions of soundscapes, rhythms, looping fragments, and deep throbbing drones. A spelunk into the wine cellars of the mind.

Previous albums by Akashic Crow’s Nest include “Skidbladni,” “Off-World Mining” and “The Void Captain’s Tale” on Webbed Hand Records, and “Fiat Lux” on Treetrunk. They are usually illustrative and conceptual. The present album is like Fiat Lux, purely abstract, and no meaning or message should be inferred from the sounds.

Fiat Lux, an outstanding EP by Akashic Crow’s Nest, features warm, percolating sounds generated using images. It is hard not to listen to this work and smile. We [at Treetrunk] bet that this music will stimulate your heart and mind both, so definitely give it a listen.

Here’s another Sci-Fi themed album by Akashic Crow’s Nest. This time, the concept centers on the experiences of a miner/prospector in a remote and hostile off-world mining colony. The sound: strong, droney ambient soundscapes, more intense that in The Void Captain’s Tale (wh015).

Skidbladni is a shorter release by Akashic Crow’s Nest. The concept here is dream logic, temporal dislocation, and auditory hallucination. The music is constructed entirely from the output of an image synthesizer (which turns pictures into sounds), with effects added, but no other instruments or samples.

This imaginary soundtrack to a sci-fi space odyssey is a synaesthetic sound gallery in the drone/ambient tradition. Inspired by Jules Verne, Norman Spinrad, and 70s synthesizer concept albums, it’s a compelling and surprising CD.

Akashic Crow’s Nest offers its own peculiar take on Webbed Hand Records’ Rain series of album-length ambient releases. The ACN sound is distinguished by the use of an image synthesizer (pictures are translated into sounds) to produce most of the auditory elements used in its compositions. Very peculiar but often remarkably musical and uncannily magical.